Warning: May Contain Silliness

Entries tagged with diy

Delayed until weekend after next because I want a weekend of downtime, damnit.

Bathroom Project/Kitchen Project:

The horrible carpet in the bathroom is gone! So's the weird underlay (which had elephant enthusing over tombola). The horrible smell hasn't gone away yet, but I'm working on that. I need to scrub the floorboards and check them for mould, fungus and/or rot and replace them when we check the floor joists. I've also removed the grout on part of the wall and will start regrouting it later this afternoon. I hope to be done with that by next week, after which I will tackle the ceiling. That should give enough time for the water company to replace the stopcock outside, which needs to be done before I can give one of the plumbers money to replace the inside stopcock so I can tackle the new floor, the bath cradle and the bathroom suite.

I'm also in the process of Getting All The Quotes: one plumber yesterday. One this morning. One electrician this morning. One electrician tomorrow morning. One plumber on Friday (to be confirmed). They're all giving me numbers and estimates and pointing out certain things may or may not be possible so I get to redesign the kitchen again.

The kitchen's a challenge anyway and one that's driving me up the wall right now. I can't rip out the kitchen before the design is finalised. I can't finalise the design without a sensible budget. I can't build a sensible budget without firm quotes from professionals. I can't get firm quotes from professionals until I know where all the pipes go and what can and can't be moved/changed/extended. I can't do that without ripping out the kitchen. I expect to do this circular dance for a while before grabbing (a by this point long-suffering) Alex by the lapels, and calmly advising him to choose between a kitchen which consists of a camping stove and a fridge or a yurt on the Mongolian plain where I will roast marmots on an open fire* and thus possibly catch my death of pneumonic plague. And then no-one will be happy.**

So yeah, I'm having fun.

*Most unfortunate Christmas snack ever.** Least of all me. And the marmot.

We've had the large wall next to the stairs replastered after my failed attempss at getting a smooth finish. It looks really sharp and pristine and isn't drying at all fast enough for my liking.

We've decided on the colour scheme and I put the first layer on the accent wall (front door wall): that first swatch of yellow on the original revealed plaster was such a visual relief. And now it's on, I can unveil the colour scheme inspiration for the hallway! http://design-seeds.com/index.php/home/entry/beijing-brights . The woodwork, walls and ceilings will be ivory/cotton white, wood panels cocoa powder brown and the accent wall that yellow (or at least close to it). Accents and flourishes will be two shades of teal, yellow and brown where appropriate (mostly panels). It's going to be amazing. *wills the large wall to dry faster* Want to paint moar noaw!

Pictures will be put up on flickr and linked as soon as my photos stop sulking and upload to the internet.

Hallway status:One wall is completely cleared, cleaned and ready for sealing. As the cheap vacuum can't deal with the plaster dust created by the sander and conks out after about 10 minutes, I ended up having to manually remove the thin layer of plaster which is an absolute bastard job. The end result is fantastic, though. I'm looking forward to making all walls look like that and then paint.

I've got the plasterer coming in on Monday to do the ceilings. While he's here, I may ask him to cover the board over the stairs as well to allow for a crisper, more modern looking hallway.

Plans for tomorrow: Bookkeeping or further research most likely. If my hip allows for it, making a start on the rest of the walls.

Finances: Yuck. I dislike bookkeeping, but as this is my job, I really need to make it part of my working week. Accountancy type people: start or end of week/month accounting? Benefits, drawbacks etc?

Current state of the house: Absolute tip. There's Stuff everywhere.

Uses of First Aid kit:One, but it's a doozy as I chunked my pinky nail while cleaning the wall.

State of the body: Ugh. I dislocated my hip while reaching to finish the last corner which, considering I was on top of a ladder at this point, made for an exciting adventure. Now self-medicating with painkillers in the hopes of making it to Cthulhu tonight. Though the searing pain in my hip is really helping to take my mind off the state of my hands, so that's an upside.

The asbestos test results have come back: the ceilings are fine, but the board under the stairs contains CHR asbestos (i.e. white, which is the best case scenario). So that board will need to be replaced once I am mostly done with the hallway and am ready to start with the stairs. So that's probably going to be a side-job during the bathroom project.

On Thursday, I've got a plasterer coming around for a quote for both ceilings and one for walls and ceilings.

Walls: cleared (apart from that one corner I can't reach as I am not a giraffe). Ceiling upstairs: see Walls.Ceiling downstairs: ...yah, no. Artex straight on either plywood or plasterboard, so that will have to be skimmed and replastered as I can even get through it with a skimming knife.

Tomorrow:

- Washing the walls with sugar soap. - Finish setting up a new bank account for finances.

So I've booked the asbestos consultant for May 1st, which means I have slighty less than two weeks to get things tidied away in preparation for the imminent DIY Extravaganza. I have my plastic boxes and know what's going in them, but there's still an element of puzzling involved which is rather stressful to me. See, contrary to what you might believe, I don't actually like rearranging things more than once *. So when it goes into a plastic box (in this case our board and card games), I need to make sure it's done in the correct way first time 'round. Otherwise I'll lose things and that would be bad.

Especially considering we're going to be going to the Games Meet in two months, meaning I need to make sure the games we're bringing are to hand, which means a separate box because they're the large ones, but there's the smaller card games which need to go in a smaller box and there's all the Munchkin stuff which won't all quite fit with the other small stuff and before you know it I'm spinning around in tiny circles going 'fneegle!' and pondering giving everything away to charity and just living with one change of clothes and my computer **.

Of course, all of this will go flying out the window in a few days when I get the hang of this whole thing and realise it's all fluid at the moment. Boxes are going to be lugged around, unpacked and repacked as needed over the next months and my gloriously logical plans will crumble before the onslaught of reality.

Still: today's result: one plastic box with card games (and some of the Munchkin stuff, because I am confident people will bring that to the Games Meet) and...er, one box of old CDs and CD-ROMs to be thrown out and a looooot of cardboard and paper for recycling.

Or, more accurately, Decision Has Been Made, Time to Make It Official Time.

I'm not pursuing any further job opportunities at the moment so I can spend at least three months on getting our house in order. Those who know me will be unsurprised I am making notes. Lots and lots of notes. With Plans on them. And planning to stick them on random walls and such.

Up to this point Project House Improvement, Or, Oh Great Squid What Have I Got Myself Into [colloquially referred to as Project H] has involved a lot of research into exciting things like asbestos testing, outside wall render, the acquisition of all the plastic storage boxes a woman could ever want and the vague hope my work is not going to make the bathroom land in the kitchen any time soon.

Putting it all down on paper means a lot of legwork, research and writing things down, because whereas azekeil understandably wants some reassurance on what I'll be doing with his money and his girlfriend, I'm more of the 'once more unto the breach' persuasion when it comes to DIY (growing up doing DIY does that for you). I've seen what happens when you hit a worst case scenario and how you deal with it and am thus happy to research as I go along, but it's also quite fun to research beforehand and to put it on paper. It allows you to visualise each required step and shows you where the natural resting points are within a project. I've actually just finished my first official plan and budget for the hallway, which includes best case and worse* case plus the one most likely to resemble reality.

I've also set up a pinterest board: http://pinterest.com/sessifet/ where I put all the cool ideas I come across. Some of it is completely out there and not remotely feasible for this place (or any place unless you've got a couple of millions hidden in your sofa cushions), but it's mostly meant for inspiration rather than reality. It also should stop me from deciding the new kitchen floor need to be made of thousands of glued and lacquered 1'' rounds of wood (though that would be kind of cool and I need to experiment with that idea).

The official kick off date for Project H (i.e., when I am 'allowed' to actually start physically removing, adding and generally altering Stuff) is May 1st. I expect I will have remodelled the entire place at least three times over in my dreams by that point.

Yay DIY!

*I have not written the worst case scenario, as that involves the discovery of high risk asbestos and us crying for a while before starting the whole thing from scratch with significantly fewer funds. It's not a bridge we are likely to have to cross during our perambulations, therefore I am content to sketch it in with a label reading 'Here Be (Fireproof) Dragons'.

Today has been spent sorting, tidying and cleaning the kitchen. Things have been moved to the utility area (which now is somewhat more ordered). Some cupboards have been moved around and some have felt azekeil's subtle touch. We now have lots of floorspace and thus more options. We have both acquired scratches and bruises and first blood has been spilled. That means the house has accepted me, right?

Tomorrow we'll start going through kitchen stuff and I'll do some cleaning, but we're mostly planning to relax and meet up with friends. (I personally think there should be lots of snuggles with azekeil as well. I'm confident this can be arranged.)

I've been nipping into the garden every once in a while and after checking blooms and leaves and such online, it seems there's more than one variety of honeysuckle in the garden. Unfortunately, my honeysuckle recognition software is not advanced enough to determine which ones I've got. Not that this matters hugely because all of them are attempting to eat the garden and each other and will therefore be trimmed back with extreme prejudice.

There's a hawthorn growing and my, it's a happy hawthorn. I think that may have something to do with the fact there's an old compost heap right behind it (hey, saves me having to find a suitable space). There's also a rosa multiflora in there somewhere, but it's not growing out of control, so it can stay for the moment.

Today has been spent sorting, tidying and cleaning the kitchen. Things have been moved to the utility area (which now is somewhat more ordered). Some cupboards have been moved around and some have felt azekeil's subtle touch. We now have lots of floorspace and thus more options. We have both acquired scratches and bruises and first blood has been spilled. That means the house has accepted me, right?

Tomorrow we'll start going through kitchen stuff and I'll do some cleaning, but we're mostly planning to relax and meet up with friends. (I personally think there should be lots of snuggles with azekeil as well. I'm confident this can be arranged.)

I've been nipping into the garden every once in a while and after checking blooms and leaves and such online, it seems there's more than one variety of honeysuckle in the garden. Unfortunately, my honeysuckle recognition software is not advanced enough to determine which ones I've got. Not that this matters hugely because all of them are attempting to eat the garden and each other and will therefore be trimmed back with extreme prejudice.

There's a hawthorn growing and my, it's a happy hawthorn. I think that may have something to do with the fact there's an old compost heap right behind it (hey, saves me having to find a suitable space). There's also a rosa multiflora in there somewhere, but it's not growing out of control, so it can stay for the moment.